Following a lunch keynote presentation by Frederick Hess, PhD, titled “Today’s Context for Education Entrepreneurship,” three of the Labs’ participants shared their reflections of participating in the program. While the other 14 have come out of it with a product to show, these three participants either pivoted drastically on the idea or dropped their first idea and start anew.
Up next are two companies in the “Higher Education” sector: Flip Learning and Persistence Plus.
The panelists for this category are:
- Darrell Kong – Director of Venture Capital Services, Fenwick & West LLP
- Jay Watkins – Managing Director, De Novo Ventures
- Ethan Gray – Vice Presiden, The Mind Trust
Find the day’s agenda at kauffman.org/edufoundersevent and descriptions of the companies at kauffmanlabs.org/companies. Refresh this page for updates after each of the founders’ presentations.
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Christian and Laura Spielvogel of Flip Learning. Photo by Danny Schreiber.
Flip Learning – Christian and Laura Spielvogel
Per the Kauffman Labs website, “Flip Learning is a digital publishing and distribution platform that allows instructors, authors, and publishers to invert or ‘flip’ traditional educational content into game-based, interactive learning environments. Our wizard (think Ning) enables content developers and providers to easily create or convert existing resources into multiplayer, role-playing simulations and gamified textbooks.”
A few highlights from the husband and wife team:
- Both tenured university professors who are here today because they firmly believe the education model is broken, but that they can have a profound impact on education through Flip Learning
- They said they’re the first digital book publisher to add a social layer and gaming layer to the text book, which they say is a $10 billion industry
- Their first product is a Reader Role-Play – for example, a student learning about the civil war will first read about it and then take part in a simulation, playing one of the roles within the simulations and then enter a chat room with the other students to discuss what took place
- For Reader Role-Plays, they’ve taken the textbook and cut it in half, leaving half of the content in written and the other half turning into interactive
- Second product is Enacting Cultures, for example a “Wedding Sim” in which students read through letters and lessons about the wedding traditions of different cultures
- Questions they posed themselves: “How do we scale this? Is it labor intensive?” They said that publishers have spent money trying to retro-fit text books into new digital context. Their solution to doing this in an effeciaent manner is called “Reader Role-Play Wizard,” which they’ve developed to walk the author through a series of steps in a content management system to create an interactive book on the fly.
- Business model is two-prong: B to C (direct K-12 student sales) and B to B licensing
- So far, the Wizard has enabled 10 professors to develop their own role playing lessons this past summer, and in the future those lessons could possibly be available to all, taking advantage of a crowd-sourced model.
- So far, the couple has tested the product with over 1,000 student and 80 teachers – 93% say they’d play it again and 91% say they’d use it again
- Five-year goal: have over 200 titles and approaching $40 million in revenue
- Motto: “Live it to learn it”
Persistence Plus – Jill Frankfort and Kenneth Salim
Per the Kauffman Labs site, “Persistence Plus offers colleges and universities a powerful solution to increase their ability to transform young adults into thriving students and ultimately successful college graduates. We are developing a mobile platform that applies cutting-edge behavioral research to foster the specific student behaviors and mindsets that lead to college persistence, completion, and life success. Our mission is to help all students develop the skills and attitudes needed to achieve a college diploma and reach their potential.” Highlights from Frankfort and Salim’s presentation:
- Frankfort cited research that indicates colleges and universities spend $6 billion each year to attract and retain students, and a one percent increase in retention would make a marked difference in the financial fortunes of those schools. But as it stands only 53 percent of all students who begin at a four-year institution actually graduate in six years. One in four don’t make it to their sophomore year.
- Having worked as high school educators, Frankfort and Salim have witnessed firsthand that, from the regimented environment of high school, students come to college without the skills to succeed when left to their own devices, and the current supports in place — advisors and tutors, orientations and residential advisors, to name a few — are insufficient to address this problem.
- Persistence Plus provides proactive support to students, using a technique that Frankfort and Salim likened to methods for helping people lose weight or stop smoking. The foundation of that methodology is the platform’s use of “small nudges” to change behavior. Students are prompted to uphold certain responsibility by “nudges” on their mobile devices and receive feedback based on their progress. Schools can also track progress from the other end.
- One of the strengths of Persistence Plus lies in the power of “team progress.” Frankfort and Salim cited statistics that suggest social networks encourage positive group behaviors like going to the gym. With the Persistence Plus platform, students can compare their own behaviors to their friends’ behaviors and, presumably, feel positive peer pressure to keep up academically.
- Salim again used the weight-loss analogy to describe Persistence plus. He said other academic performance address part of the problem. “There are competitors that give you a scale and tell you you’re overweight,” he said, “but don’t actually do anything to help you lose that weight.” Other systems address the whole problem but at a cost that’s not scalable. Persistence plus does both.
